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• Using a SMTP Service for email

  - by Josh S.

  This may be a horribly obvious question, but I'm learning and just need someone to confirm it for me. I putting together a private social network that needs to email their members (through the social network software, Elgg) regularly. I'm hosting it on a shared HostGator plan (because they won't receive much traffic) and they'll email 10-1000 emails a few times a week. HostGator restricts you to 500 per hour. I'm also worried about deliverability. I've been searching up and down about how to throttle the emails so it will all send reliably... but then I came across the idea of an outside SMTP relay service. Would using an SMTP service resolve this issue? If so, any opinions on quality SMTP services?

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• Webinar: Meeting Customer Expectations in the New Age of Retail

  - by Sanjeev Sharma

  Webcast Date: Thursday, November 8, 2012 Time: 10am PT/ 1pm ET The retail market has expanded into the online, mobile, and social worlds. But the key to success hasn’t changed since the days of traditional, brick-and-mortar business. It’s still about service. A successful retailer today in omni-channel customer engagement must be able to deliver quality service that meets customer expectations. For many retailers, Oracle Web commerce applications help them achieve that success, allowing them to market, interact, and transact across multiple channels in a predictable, consistent, and personalized manner. Join us for this Webcast, and learn what Oracle applications can do for your business. In this session, we will discuss: The significance and dimensions of modern omni-channel customer experience The Oracle Commerce platform Real-world examples of business value derived by running customer-facing applications on Oracle Engineered Systems Register today Speakers: Sanjeev Sharma Principal Product Director, Oracle Exalogic, Oracle Kelly Goetsch Senior Principal Product Manager, Oracle Commerce, Oracle Dan Conway Senior Product Manager, Oracle Retail, Oracle

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• Do we set the bar too high by requiring that code tests not suffer from buffer overflow?

  - by brice

  We are currently recruiting for a Junior Developer position working mainly in C on Linux. As part of the process, we require candidates to complete a code test at their leisure in C. So far we have rejected two candidates on the basis that their code, although readable and in one case rather idiomatic, suffered from buffer overflow errors due to unbounded buffer writes. Are buffer overflows acceptable from a graduate developer? Are we setting the bar too high? What is the expected capability of graduate/Junior engineers? [Edit]: We explicitly ask for error-checked, production quality code. We provide a test & build framework for the candidates

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• NEW: Oracle Practice Exams

  - by Harold Green

  The Oracle University team continues to strive to make high-quality certification preparation tools available to our candidates. In support of this effort, we have expanded our relationship with Kaplan SelfTest.   Kaplan SelfTest is now an Oracle Authorized Practice Test Provider delivering a new feature-rich and fully authorized series of certification practice exams. Practice tests are one of the most effective ways candidates can prepare for an Oracle certification exam. Authorized practice exams help candidates to self assess their knowledge using realistic exam simulations. These practice exams utilize best-in-class practice exam tools including: Learning Mode (fully customize your own practice exam preferences), Certification Mode (simulates a real, timed testing situation) and Flash Cards (self check on key topical concepts). Customers may purchase practice exams from Oracle, with 30-day or 12-month access, or from Kaplan SelfTest directly. As an added benefit, Oracle University Learning Credits may be applied to purchases made from Oracle. View a current list of available practice tests.

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• Is php|architect any good?

  - by Andrew Heath

  Kind of a hard topic to search for, as architect turns up a lot about software architects instead. After 8 months of PHP self-study, I finally stumbled across the php|architect site. The length of time it took me to find it makes me suspicious of its quality. 3 related questions: do professional PHP coders read/care about php|architect? is it a good source for PHP beginners? assuming yes to either of the above, how far back in the archives to articles remain relevant? (ex: does stuff written about PHP4 still matter?)

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• JavaOne 2011: Content review process and Tips for submissions

  - by arungupta

  The Technical Sessions, Birds of Feather, Panels, and Hands-on labs (basically all the content delivered at JavaOne) forms the backbone of the conference. At this year's JavaOne conference you'll have access to the rock star speakers, the ability to engage with luminaries in the hallways, and have beer (or 2) with community peers in designated areas. Even though the conference is Oct 2-6, 2011, and will be bigger and better than last year's conference, the Call for Paper submission and review/selection evaluation started much earlier.In previous years, I've participated in the review process and this year I was honored to serve as co-lead for the "Enterprise Service Architecture and Cloud" track with Ludovic Champenois. We had a stellar review team with an equal mix of Oracle and external community reviewers. The review process is very overwhelming with the reviewers going through multiple voting iterations on each submission in order to ensure that the selected content is the BEST of the submitted lot. Our ultimate goal was to ensure that the content best represented the track, and most importantly would draw interest and excitement from attendees. As always, the number and quality of submissions were just superb, making for a truly challenging (and rewarding) experience for the reviewers. As co-lead I tried to ensure that I applied a fair and balanced process in the evaluation of content in my track. . Here are some key steps followed by all track leads: Vote on sessions - Each reviewer is required to vote on the sessions on a scale of 1-5 - and also provide a justifying comment. Create buckets - Divide the submissions into different buckets to ensure a fair representation of different topics within a track. This ensures that if a particular bucket got higher votes then the track is not exclusively skewed towards it. Top 7 - The review committee provides a list of the top 7 talks that can be used in the promotional material by the JavaOne team. Generally these talks are easy to identify and a consensus is reached upon them fairly quickly. First cut - Each track is allocated a total number of sessions (including panels), BoFs, and Hands-on labs that can be approved. The track leads then start creating the first cut of the approvals using the casted votes coupled with their prior experience in the subject matter. In our case, Ludo and I have been attending/speaking at JavaOne (and other popular Java-focused conferences) for double digit years. The Grind - The first cut is then refined and refined and refined using multiple selection criteria such as sorting on the bucket, speaker quality, topic popularity, cumulative vote total, and individual vote scale. The sessions that don't make the cut are reviewed again as well to ensure if they need to replace one of the selected one as a potential alternate. I would like to thank the entire Java community for all the submissions and many thanks to the reviewers who spent countless hours reading each abstract, voting on them, and helping us refine the list. I think approximately 3-4 hours cumulative were spent on each submission to reach an evaluation, specifically the border line cases. We gave our recommendations to the JavaOne Program Committee Chairperson (Sharat Chander) and accept/decline notifications should show up in submitter inboxes in the next few weeks. Here are some points to keep in mind when submitting a session to JavaOne next time: JavaOne is a technology-focused conference so any product, marketing or seemingly marketish talk are put at the bottom of the list.Oracle Open World and Oracle Develop are better options for submitting product specific talks. Make your title catchy. Remember the attendees are more likely to read the abstract if they like the title. We try our best to recategorize the talk to a different track if it needs to but please ensure that you are filing in the right track to have all the right eyeballs looking at it. Also, it does not hurt marking an alternate track if your talk meets the criteria. Make sure to coordinate within your team before the submission - multiple sessions from the same team or company does not ensure that the best speaker is picked. In such case we rely upon your "google presence" and/or review committee's prior knowledge of the speaker. The reviewers may not know you or your product at all and you get 750 characters to pitch your idea. Make sure to use all of them, to the last 750th character. Make sure to read your abstract multiple times to ensure that you are giving all the relevant information ? Think through your presentation and see if you are leaving out any important aspects.Also look if the abstract has any redundant information that will not required by the reviewers. There are additional sections that allow you to share information about the speaker and the presentation summary. Use them to blow the horn about yourself and any other relevant details. Please don't say "call me at xxx-xxx-xxxx to find out the details" :-) The review committee enjoyed reviewing the submissions and we certainly hope you'll have a great time attending them. Happy JavaOne!

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• JavaOne 2011: Content review process and Tips for submissions

  - by arungupta

  The Technical Sessions, Birds of Feather, Panels, and Hands-on labs (basically all the content delivered at JavaOne) forms the backbone of the conference. At this year's JavaOne conference you'll have access to the rock star speakers, the ability to engage with luminaries in the hallways, and have beer (or 2) with community peers in designated areas. Even though the conference is Oct 2-6, 2011, and will be bigger and better than last year's conference, the Call for Paper submission and review/selection evaluation started much earlier.In previous years, I've participated in the review process and this year I was honored to serve as co-lead for the "Enterprise Service Architecture and Cloud" track with Ludovic Champenois. We had a stellar review team with an equal mix of Oracle and external community reviewers. The review process is very overwhelming with the reviewers going through multiple voting iterations on each submission in order to ensure that the selected content is the BEST of the submitted lot. Our ultimate goal was to ensure that the content best represented the track, and most importantly would draw interest and excitement from attendees. As always, the number and quality of submissions were just superb, making for a truly challenging (and rewarding) experience for the reviewers. As co-lead I tried to ensure that I applied a fair and balanced process in the evaluation of content in my track. . Here are some key steps followed by all track leads: Vote on sessions - Each reviewer is required to vote on the sessions on a scale of 1-5 - and also provide a justifying comment. Create buckets - Divide the submissions into different buckets to ensure a fair representation of different topics within a track. This ensures that if a particular bucket got higher votes then the track is not exclusively skewed towards it. Top 7 - The review committee provides a list of the top 7 talks that can be used in the promotional material by the JavaOne team. Generally these talks are easy to identify and a consensus is reached upon them fairly quickly. First cut - Each track is allocated a total number of sessions (including panels), BoFs, and Hands-on labs that can be approved. The track leads then start creating the first cut of the approvals using the casted votes coupled with their prior experience in the subject matter. In our case, Ludo and I have been attending/speaking at JavaOne (and other popular Java-focused conferences) for double digit years. The Grind - The first cut is then refined and refined and refined using multiple selection criteria such as sorting on the bucket, speaker quality, topic popularity, cumulative vote total, and individual vote scale. The sessions that don't make the cut are reviewed again as well to ensure if they need to replace one of the selected one as a potential alternate. I would like to thank the entire Java community for all the submissions and many thanks to the reviewers who spent countless hours reading each abstract, voting on them, and helping us refine the list. I think approximately 3-4 hours cumulative were spent on each submission to reach an evaluation, specifically the border line cases. We gave our recommendations to the JavaOne Program Committee Chairperson (Sharat Chander) and accept/decline notifications should show up in submitter inboxes in the next few weeks. Here are some points to keep in mind when submitting a session to JavaOne next time: JavaOne is a technology-focused conference so any product, marketing or seemingly marketish talk are put at the bottom of the list.Oracle Open World and Oracle Develop are better options for submitting product specific talks. Make your title catchy. Remember the attendees are more likely to read the abstract if they like the title. We try our best to recategorize the talk to a different track if it needs to but please ensure that you are filing in the right track to have all the right eyeballs looking at it. Also, it does not hurt marking an alternate track if your talk meets the criteria. Make sure to coordinate within your team before the submission - multiple sessions from the same team or company does not ensure that the best speaker is picked. In such case we rely upon your "google presence" and/or review committee's prior knowledge of the speaker. The reviewers may not know you or your product at all and you get 750 characters to pitch your idea. Make sure to use all of them, to the last 750th character. Make sure to read your abstract multiple times to ensure that you are giving all the relevant information ? Think through your presentation and see if you are leaving out any important aspects.Also look if the abstract has any redundant information that will not required by the reviewers. There are additional sections that allow you to share information about the speaker and the presentation summary. Use them to blow the horn about yourself and any other relevant details. Please don't say "call me at xxx-xxx-xxxx to find out the details" :-) The review committee enjoyed reviewing the submissions and we certainly hope you'll have a great time attending them. Happy JavaOne!

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• Does Ubuntu Touch consume less than Android?

  - by Eduard Florinescu

  One of the problems of new OSs is power consumption. That is because power and performance requires a lot of tweaks and experience with the kernel, drivers and OS code-base on one hand, and a lot of extensive long-term test and quality assurance on the other hand. Given that Android is a rather old and established OS I saw that it has pretty good power consumption. Phoronix does this kind of comparissions but I was not able to find to much about Ubuntu Touch. Does Ubuntu Touch consume less than Android in general, do you have data on some platforms compared?

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• How do I know if my system is capable of playing 24bit/96kHz sound?

  - by Igor Zinov'yev

  Let me state for the record that I'm a total noob when it comes to Hi-Fi sound systems, but I am rather picky about the sound quality. Normally I listen to CD recordings ripped to FLAC in 16/44, but I have several albums that are also ripped from vinyls to FLAC in 24/96. But it seems that I can't tell the difference between 16-bit and 24-bit versions (except for some vinyl noises, of course). That can be due to several reasons: my equipment (onboard audio, monitor headphones) isn't good enough to make any difference, my system is not playing audio in 24-bit 96 kHz, I am physically unable to hear the difference. So here is my question, how do I tell if my system can play 24-bit sound with 96 or 192 kHz resolution? And if it can, how do I tell that it plays it instead of downsampling to 16-bit / 44 kHz? Also, what hardware (audio cards, amplifiers, etc.) would you recommend to play such recordings on Ubuntu?

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• Typing tutor games with good playablity

  - by matt wilkie

  Are there any linux typing tutor games which are enjoyable games in their own right? I'm a computer professional, but have never learned to type properly. I also don't want my kids to pick up my bad habits! The kids are okay with TuxTyping, for a time. Something like Typing of the Dead sounds great, but is Windows only, and as far as I can tell one of a kind. I also don't want the young'uns hooked on first person shooters just yet. So are there any quality typing games for a range of ages?

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• Vermont IT Jobs: Burlington based Microsoft Gold Partner looking for .NET Devs

  Software Engineers Competitive Computing, aka C2, is seeking Software Engineers to design, architect, and maintain .NET applications to support our clients eCommerce business requirements. The successful candidates will create high-quality ASP.NET web and eCommerce sites using web-based tools and techniques. Experience with languages including C#, VB.NET, ASP.NET, and JavaScript are a must. The ideal candidate will have a thorough understanding of internet and database architecture, and a high...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• How can you print a text file via gedit from the command line?

  - by dan

  I'd like to use gedit or some similar program just as a page formatter and pipe some text through it and onto the printer. | lpr just doesn't cut it in the presentation department. The printed output is subpar, even if I try to tinker with the margin and font size options. But I like the way text looks like when printed from gedit. Is there a way to have the best of both worlds and use a command line pipeline to print a text file with gedit-quality formatting?

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• Little Wheel Is An Atmospheric and Engaging Point-and-Click Adventure

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  If you’re a fan of the resurgence of highly stylized and atmospheric adventure games–such as Spirit, World of Goo, and the like–you’ll definitely want to check out this well executed, free, and more than a little bit charming browser-based game. Little Wheel is set in a world of robots where, 10,000 years ago, a terrible accident at the central power plant left all the robots without power. The entire robot world went into a deep sleep and now, thanks to a freak lightning strike, one little robot has woken up. Your job, as that little robot, is to navigate the world of Little Wheel and help bring it back to life. Hit up the link below to play the game for free–the quality of the visual and audio design make going full screen and turning the speakers on a must. Little Wheel [via Freeware Genuis] How to Make Your Laptop Choose a Wired Connection Instead of Wireless HTG Explains: What Is Two-Factor Authentication and Should I Be Using It? HTG Explains: What Is Windows RT and What Does It Mean To Me?

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• What are the roles of a Software Delivery Manager

  - by Rich

  I have been told about a position that may be open to me - the role of a Software Delivery Manager. From what I understand this role does not already exist within my organisation. To be perfectly honest I'm not quite sure what a Software Delivery Manager's roles are. I have a few ideas and would appreciate some input around whether they are correct or not, or if there is anything missing: ensure the quality of the software being delivered document the relationships between the components being delivered ensure that the delivery of these components does not break other components ensure that the components being developed make the best use of the environments they are being deployed in being on-hand during software deliveries (though not actually performing the delivery of software, rather giving the Go) I have also been told that the role would include some software development work (which is important to me being a developer at heart!) - is there software development specifically associated with the role of Software Delivery Manager or is this more likely to just be a case of helping the team out when time is short?

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• How can I most efficiently communicate my personal code of ethics, and its implications?

  - by blueberryfields

  There is a lot to the definition of a professional. There are many questions here asking how to identify components of what is essentially a professional programmer - how do you identify or communicate expertise, specialization, high quality work, excellent skills in relation to the profession. I am specifically looking for methods to communicate a specific component, and I quote from wikipedia: A high standard of professional ethics, behavior and work activities while carrying out one's profession (as an employee, self-employed person, career, enterprise, business, company, or partnership/associate/colleague, etc.). The professional owes a higher duty to a client, often a privilege of confidentiality, as well as a duty not to abandon the client just because he or she may not be able to pay or remunerate the professional. Often the professional is required to put the interest of the client ahead of his own interests. How can I most efficiently communicate my professionalism, in the spirit of the quote above, to current and potential clients and employers?

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• Will high reputation in Programmers help to get a good job?

  - by Lorenzo

  In reference to this question, do you think that having a high reputation on this site will help to get a good job? Aside silly and humorous questions, on Programmers we can see a lot of high quality theory questions. I think that, if Stack Overflow will eventually evolve in "strictly programming related" (which usually is "strictly coding related"), the questions on Programmers will be much more interesting and meaningful ("Stack Overflow" = "I have this specific coding/implementation issue"; "Programmers" = "Best practices, team shaping, paradigms, CS theory"). So could high reputation on this site help (or at least be a good reference)? And then, more o less than Stack Overflow?

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• Proper way to create and work with a subdomain?

  - by Genadinik

  My site got effected by Panda, and I am trying to see if making a subdomain would work. The site is comehike.com, and I created a subdomain which is currently empty at hiking.comehike.com I have a directory /outdoors that has some high quality hand-written articles. I want to put those into the new subdomain to see what would happen. My questions are: Should I just copy and paste the files for those pages into the new subdomain's folder, and just change all the links in all my pages from the original domain to the new subdomain? Should I just do a 301 redirect to the new subdomain? Since test.site.com and www.site.com are different domains, will the new page have to start from scratch in terms of Pagerank, and its rankings in the SERPs?

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• Do search engines directly penalize bad grammar?

  - by Nicolas Raoul

  Let's say I have a web page with user-contributed content, which is good content but with bad grammar, slang terms, inappropriate tone. I know that bad grammar is a also a problem because it drives away visitors and scares people from linking to it, but let's put that aside. Let's also put aside the fact that incorrectly spelt terms might be ignored by a crawler, potentially leading to less text-comparizon hits. QUESTION: Do search engines like Google directly recognize and penalize bad grammar? For instance because they might consider bad-grammar as a sign of low-quality content.

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• Do Limited Wi-Fi Channels Restrict Network Availability?

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Wi-Fi protocol supports 13 communication channels; how do these channels relate to the volume of devices you can have on the network and the quality of the connection? Read on learn more about Wi-Fi channel usage. Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-drive grouping of Q&A web sites. Why Does 64-Bit Windows Need a Separate “Program Files (x86)” Folder? Why Your Android Phone Isn’t Getting Operating System Updates and What You Can Do About It How To Delete, Move, or Rename Locked Files in Windows

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• Should I demand unit-testing from programmers?

  - by Morten

  I work at a place, where we buy a lot of IT-projects. We are currently producing a standard for systems-requirements for the requisition of future projects. In that process, We are discussing whether or not we can demand automated unit testing from our suppliers. I firmly believe, that proper automated unit-testing is the only way to document the quality and stability of the code. Everyone else seems to think that unit-testing is an optional method that concerns the supplier alone. Thus, we will make no demands of automated unit-testing, continous testing, coverage-reports, inspections of unit-tests or any of the kind. I find this policy extremely frustrating. Am I totally out of line here? Please provide me with arguments for any of the oppinions.

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• No bass from the speakers

  - by Bhavesh Jogadia

  In Ubuntu 11.10 no bass sound at all when try to play mp3 or 2channels audio. I have 5.1/6 channels speakers. When I test speakers from the sound preference it works perfectly fine and then I try to play any MP3 there is no bass only the speakers work, I play 5.1 movies it plays fine bass sounds good. Also tried to to some changes as instructed with deamon.conf file but no go... When I turn my speakers on play speakers only mode it plays the bass but sound quality is not good compared to normal playing. I have a Creative 5.1 vx ca0160 sound card. In Windows also had the same problem unless I do bass redirection crossover frequency so is there any kinda software package or any kinda changes i can make in system file so that my speaker bass works fine or any thing who can let me change the bass redirection crossover frequency?

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• Is php|architect any good?

  - by Andrew Heath

  Kind of a hard topic to search for, as architect turns up a lot about software architects instead. After 8 months of PHP self-study, I finally stumbled across the php|architect site. The length of time it took me to find it makes me suspicious of its quality. 3 related questions: do professional PHP coders read/care about php|architect? is it a good source for PHP beginners? assuming yes to either of the above, how far back in the archives to articles remain relevant? (ex: does stuff written about PHP4 still matter?)

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• How can I record an OpenGL game in Ubuntu?

  - by fish

  I would like to create a short clip of me playing Minecraft, an OpenGL game. The usual screencast recorders do not properly record OpenGL. What kind of software is available for this purpose? My experience with the software in the similar (but no longer duplicate) question: kazam: very low framerate despite setting to 60 FPS, no sound, unity menubar constantly flashing through the fullscreen window. RecordMyDesktop: max framerate setting is 50 FPS, but the video becomes extremely fast if not using the default 15 FPS. xvidcap: not available on 12.04 tibesti: not available on 12.04 wink: does not run ffmpeg: very low quality video and no sound with the recommended settings, might be tunable though (no gui unfortunately). kdenlive: uses recordmydesktop, and the recorded clip becomes corrupted aconv: video sped up, often broken image, no sound

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• The Arab HEUG is now a reality, and other random thoughts

  - by user9147039

  I just returned from Doha, Qatar where the first of its kind HEUG (Higher Education User Group) meeting for institutions in the Middle East and North Africa was held at Qatar University and jointly hosted by Damman University from Saudi Arabia. Over 80 delegates attended including representation from education institutions in Oman, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Qatar. There are many other regional HEUG organizations in place (in Australia/New Zealand, APAC, EMEA, as well as smaller regional HEUG’s in the Netherlands, South Africa, and in regions of the US), but it was truly an accomplishment to see this Middle East/North Africa group organize and launch their chapter with a meeting of this quality. To be known as the Arab HEUG going forward, I am excited about the prospects for sharing between the institutions and for the growth of Oracle solutions in the region. In particular the hosts for the event (Qatar University) did a masterful job with logistics and organization, and the quality of the event was a testament to their capabilities. Among the more interesting and enlightening presentations I attended were one from Dammam University on the lessons learned from their implementation of Campus Solutions and transition off of Banner, as well as the use by Qatar University E-business Suite for grants management (both pre-and post-award). The most notable fact coming from this latter presentation was the fit (89%) of e-Business Suite Grants to the university’s requirements. In a few weeks time we will be convening the 5th meeting of the Oracle Education & Research Industry Strategy Council in Redwood Shores (5th since my advent into my current role). The main topics of discussion will be around our Higher Education Applications Strategy for the future (including cloud approaches to ERP (HCM, Finance, and Student Information Systems), how some cases studies on the benefits of leveraging delivered functionality and extensibility in the software (versus customization). On the second day of the event we will turn our attention to Oracle in Research and also budgeting and planning in higher education. Both of these sessions will include significant participation from council members in the form of panel discussions. Our EVP’s for Systems (John Fowler) and for Global Cloud Services and North America application sales (Joanne Olson) will join us for the discussion. I recently read a couple of articles that were surprising to me. The first was from Inside Higher Ed on October 15 entitled, “As colleges prepare for major software upgrades, Kuali tries to woo them from corporate vendors.” It continues to disappointment that after all this time we are still debating whether it is better to build enterprise software through open or community source initiatives when fully functional, flexible, supported, and widely adopted options exist in the marketplace. Over a decade or more ago when these solutions were relatively immature and there was a great deal of turnover in the market I could appreciate the initiatives like Kuali. But let’s not kid ourselves – the real objective of this movement is to counter a perceived predatory commercial software industry. Again, when commercial solutions are deployed as written without significant customization, and standard business processes are adopted, the cost of these solutions (relative to the value delivered) is quite low, and certain much lower than the massive investment (and risk) in in-house developers to support a bespoke community source system. In this era of cost pressures in education and the need to refocus resources on teaching, learning, and research, I believe it’s bordering on irresponsible to continue to pursue open-source ERP. Many of the adopter’s total costs are staggering and have little to show for their efforts and expended resources. The second article was recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education and was entitled “’Big Data’ Is Bunk, Obama Campaign’s Tech Guru Tells University Leaders.” This one was so outrageous I almost don’t want to legitimize it by referencing it here. In the article the writer relays statements made by Harper Reed, President Obama’s former CTO for his 2012 re-election campaign, that big data solutions in education have no relevance and are akin to snake oil. He goes on to state that while he’s a fan of data-driven decision making in education, most of the necessary analysis can be accomplished in Excel spreadsheets. Yeah… right. This is exactly what ails education (higher education in particular). Dozens of shadow and siloed systems running on spreadsheets with limited-to-no enterprise wide initiatives to harness the data-rich environment that is a higher ed institution and transform the data into useable information. I’ll grant Mr. Reed that “Big Data” is overused and hackneyed, but imperatives like improving student success in higher education are classic big data problems that data-mining and predictive analytics can address. Further, higher ed need to be producing a massive amount more data scientists and analysts than are currently in the pipeline, to further this discipline and application of these tools to many many other problems across multiple industries.

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• Partner Blog Series: PwC Perspectives - The Gotchas, The Do's and Don'ts for IDM Implementations

  - by Tanu Sood

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mso-tstyle-border-bottom-themecolor:accent6; font-family:"Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Georgia; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Georgia; mso-hansi-theme-font:major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6LastRow {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:last-row; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-border-top:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-top-themecolor:accent6; mso-tstyle-border-bottom:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-bottom-themecolor:accent6; color:#968C6D; mso-themecolor:text2; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6FirstCol {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:first-column; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6LastCol {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:last-column; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-border-top:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-top-themecolor:accent6; mso-tstyle-border-bottom:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-bottom-themecolor:accent6; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6OddColumn {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:odd-column; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-shading:#F7CBC7; mso-tstyle-shading-themecolor:accent6; mso-tstyle-shading-themetint:63;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6OddRow {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:odd-row; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-shading:#F7CBC7; mso-tstyle-shading-themecolor:accent6; mso-tstyle-shading-themetint:63;} It is generally accepted among business communities that technology by itself is not a silver bullet to all problems, but when it is combined with leading practices, strategy, careful planning and execution, it can create a recipe for success. This post attempts to highlight some of the best practices along with dos & don’ts that our practice has accumulated over the years in the identity & access management space in general, and also in the context of R2, in particular. Best Practices The following section illustrates the leading practices in “How” to plan, implement and sustain a successful OIM deployment, based on our collective experience. Planning is critical, but often overlooked A common approach to planning an IAM program that we identify with our clients is the three step process involving a current state assessment, a future state roadmap and an executable strategy to get there. It is extremely beneficial for clients to assess their current IAM state, perform gap analysis, document the recommended controls to address the gaps, align future state roadmap to business initiatives and get buy in from all stakeholders involved to improve the chances of success. When designing an enterprise-wide solution, the scalability of the technology must accommodate the future growth of the enterprise and the projected identity transactions over several years. Aligning the implementation schedule of OIM to related information technology projects increases the chances of success. As a baseline, it is recommended to match hardware specifications to the sizing guide for R2 published by Oracle. Adherence to this will help ensure that the hardware used to support OIM will not become a bottleneck as the adoption of new services increases. If your Organization has numerous connected applications that rely on reconciliation to synchronize the access data into OIM, consider hosting dedicated instances to handle reconciliation. Finally, ensure the use of clustered environment for development and have at least three total environments to help facilitate a controlled migration to production. If your Organization is planning to implement role based access control, we recommend performing a role mining exercise and consolidate your enterprise roles to keep them manageable. In addition, many Organizations have multiple approval flows to control access to critical roles, applications and entitlements. If your Organization falls into this category, we highly recommend that you limit the number of approval workflows to a small set. Most Organizations have operations managed across data centers with backend database synchronization, if your Organization falls into this category, ensure that the overall latency between the datacenters when replicating the databases is less than ten milliseconds to ensure that there are no front office performance impacts. Ingredients for a successful implementation During the development phase of your project, there are a number of guidelines that can be followed to help increase the chances for success. Most implementations cannot be completed without the use of customizations. If your implementation requires this, it’s a good practice to perform code reviews to help ensure quality and reduce code bottlenecks related to performance. We have observed at our clients that the development process works best when team members adhere to coding leading practices. Plan for time to correct coding defects and ensure developers are empowered to report their own bugs for maximum transparency. Many organizations struggle with defining a consistent approach to managing logs. This is particularly important due to the amount of information that can be logged by OIM. We recommend Oracle Diagnostics Logging (ODL) as an alternative to be used for logging. ODL allows log files to be formatted in XML for easy parsing and does not require a server restart when the log levels are changed during troubleshooting. Testing is a vital part of any large project, and an OIM R2 implementation is no exception. We suggest that at least one lower environment should use production-like data and connectors. Configurations should match as closely as possible. For example, use secure channels between OIM and target platforms in pre-production environments to test the configurations, the migration processes of certificates, and the additional overhead that encryption could impose. Finally, we ask our clients to perform database backups regularly and before any major change event, such as a patch or migration between environments. In the lowest environments, we recommend to have at least a weekly backup in order to prevent significant loss of time and effort. Similarly, if your organization is using virtual machines for one or more of the environments, it is recommended to take frequent snapshots so that rollbacks can occur in the event of improper configuration. Operate & sustain the solution to derive maximum benefits When migrating OIM R2 to production, it is important to perform certain activities that will help achieve a smoother transition. At our clients, we have seen that splitting the OIM tables into their own tablespaces by categories (physical tables, indexes, etc.) can help manage database growth effectively. If we notice that a client hasn’t enabled the Oracle-recommended indexing in the applicable database, we strongly suggest doing so to improve performance. Additionally, we work with our clients to make sure that the audit level is set to fit the organization’s auditing needs and sometimes even allocate UPA tables and indexes into their own table-space for better maintenance. Finally, many of our clients have set up schedules for reconciliation tables to be archived at regular intervals in order to keep the size of the database(s) reasonable and result in optimal database performance. For our clients that anticipate availability issues with target applications, we strongly encourage the use of the offline provisioning capabilities of OIM R2. This reduces the provisioning process for a given target application dependency on target availability and help avoid broken workflows. To account for this and other abnormalities, we also advocate that OIM’s monitoring controls be configured to alert administrators on any abnormal situations. Within OIM R2, we have begun advising our clients to utilize the ‘profile’ feature to encapsulate multiple commonly requested accounts, roles, and/or entitlements into a single item. By setting up a number of profiles that can be searched for and used, users will spend less time performing the same exact steps for common tasks. We advise our clients to follow the Oracle recommended guides for database and application server tuning which provides a good baseline configuration. It offers guidance on database connection pools, connection timeouts, user interface threads and proper handling of adapters/plug-ins. All of these can be important configurations that will allow faster provisioning and web page response times. Many of our clients have begun to recognize the value of data mining and a remediation process during the initial phases of an implementation (to help ensure high quality data gets loaded) and beyond (to support ongoing maintenance and business-as-usual processes). A successful program always begins with identifying the data elements and assigning a classification level based on criticality, risk, and availability. It should finish by following through with a remediation process. Dos & Don’ts Here are the most common dos and don'ts that we socialize with our clients, derived from our experience implementing the solution. Dos Don’ts Scope the project into phases with realistic goals. Look for quick wins to show success and value to the stake holders. Avoid “boiling the ocean” and trying to integrate all enterprise applications in the first phase. Establish an enterprise ID (universal unique ID across the enterprise) earlier in the program. Avoid major UI customizations that require code changes. Have a plan in place to patch during the project, which helps alleviate any major issues or roadblocks (product and database). Avoid publishing all the target entitlements if you don't anticipate their usage during access request. Assess your current state and prepare a roadmap to address your operations, tactical and strategic goals, align it with your business priorities. Avoid integrating non-production environments with your production target systems. Defer complex integrations to the later phases and take advantage of lessons learned from previous phases Avoid creating multiple accounts for the same user on the same system, if there is an opportunity to do so. Have an identity and access data quality initiative built into your plan to identify and remediate data related issues early on. Avoid creating complex approval workflows that would negative impact productivity and SLAs. Identify the owner of the identity systems with fair IdM knowledge and empower them with authority to make product related decisions. This will help ensure overcome any design hurdles. Avoid creating complex designs that are not sustainable long term and would need major overhaul during upgrades. Shadow your internal or external consulting resources during the implementation to build the necessary product skills needed to operate and sustain the solution. Avoid treating IAM as a point solution and have appropriate level of communication and training plan for the IT and business users alike. Conclusion In our experience, Identity programs will struggle with scope, proper resourcing, and more. We suggest that companies consider the suggestions discussed in this post and leverage them to help enable their identity and access program. This concludes PwC blog series on R2 for the month and we sincerely hope that the information we have shared thus far has been beneficial. For more information or if you have questions, you can reach out to Rex Thexton, Senior Managing Director, PwC and or Dharma Padala, Director, PwC. We look forward to hearing from you. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:12.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:12.0pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Arial; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Arial; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Meet the Writers: Dharma Padala is a Director in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has been implementing medium to large scale Identity Management solutions across multiple industries including utility, health care, entertainment, retail and financial sectors.   Dharma has 14 years of experience in delivering IT solutions out of which he has been implementing Identity Management solutions for the past 8 years. Praveen Krishna is a Manager in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  Over the last decade Praveen has helped clients plan, architect and implement Oracle identity solutions across diverse industries.  His experience includes delivering security across diverse topics like network, infrastructure, application and data where he brings a holistic point of view to problem solving. Scott MacDonald is a Director in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has consulted for several clients across multiple industries including financial services, health care, automotive and retail.   Scott has 10 years of experience in delivering Identity Management solutions. John Misczak is a member of the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has experience implementing multiple Identity and Access Management solutions, specializing in Oracle Identity Manager and Business Process Engineering Language (BPEL).

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